I am a self-taught web developer, entrepreneur, and mentor. Being curious is the basis of my journey so far.
While studying for a master’s degree in Central European History, small personal programming projects challenged me. I built a multilingual dictionary for three Slavic languages, German and English, or automated my account in a multiplayer online game to push me into the top 10.
After my studies, I used an entrepreneurial scholarship to build a semi-automatic translation tool to help occasional translators find the right word. Although it failed economically, it paved my road to becoming an entrepreneur.
For a while, I built online shops and platforms for clients, often benefitting from the knowledge about marketing and SEO I gained from my site projects. Many of these projects are still leading in their field today.
In 2009, I drew lousy letters in Scrabble, which led me to develop the first Scrabble word search for German. A few years later, this turned into a publishing business. Before selling the project nine years later, my team and I reached millions of users and more than 40 MM page impressions per month.
Part of my platform’s financial success was a WordPress plugin I engineered to deliver display ads on our websites. It was the first to tailor ads to responsive devices and had various options to split test ad content and positions.
In 2014, I published this in-house project under the name Advanced Ads. It quickly grew into its own business, supporting a team of up to twelve. I sold it in early 2023 and stayed on board as a consultant. Starting in August 2024, I am the Operations Manager, coordinating non-dev work.
Since 2012, I have been managing projects through my company webgilde1. Among the active ones are my image caption plugin, Image Source Control, and a travel site about Slovakia (in German).
So far, my career reads like a success story, but I have had more failures than wins. I am still curious.
- The German word “Gilde” is “guild” in English. I originally wanted to gather many talented people to work on different projects. ↩︎